Keeping Your Event List Engaged

How often do you engage your list? Engaging your list means sending some type of information to a group of target market subscribers. The materials could be anything from an email newsletter to using “snail mail” to keep in touch. In other posts I’ve given out information for growing your list. In today’s post, I’m going to quickly look at some ways to deal with people unsubscribing from your list.

When you’re growing your list it’s really important to get your timing interval set for what works best for your target market. Over the years I’ve seen both sides of the engagement spectrum, from too much to too little. My clients engage their list anywhere from once a quarter to every week. Contrary to popular belief, too many people under engage their list.

Ask Two Questions . . .

One recommendation for determining how many times to engage your list is to look at all your points of feedback and data. There are two recommendations I have for my clients. Ask yourself the following two questions as they apply to your list:

Are a number of people unsubscribing from your list?If you’re getting a high number of people unsubscribing from your list you might want to take a hard look at your tactics. A big factor in high unsubscribe rates is people feeling like they’re getting “sales pitched to death.” If you are sending high quality information you can probably send more often and not see as many people unsubscribe. There is one client I have with a list of almost 600 email subscribers. They’ve been sending regular emails out, now sending weekly, and two people have unsubscribed. I would argue that 2 people unsubscribing is a very low rate for sending emails over 5 months.

What type of feedback are your list subscribers sending you?Are people very positive with their responses to your emails? If nobody is writing you back and you find people are still unsubscribing, you might not be connecting with your target market. Look for quality versus quantity on the feedback issue. Don’t assume that because you’re not getting a deluge of positive emails that something is wrong. When my client with the 600 person email list ask for feedback from their list only 10 people responded. But all the responses were very positive. If you are getting primarily negative responses or people are expressing concern, it’s time to change how you engage your list.

The Simplest Thing to DoSend your list an email and ask them what they think of the information you are providing them. Every time I ask people to write what they think the response has been extremely enlightening. If you’re having challenges with your list, you might find that you list subscribers can give you value feedback for improvements.

Maintaining your list might be more important than growing your list. It doesn’t matter how many people you get to subscribe if they don’t stay very long on your list.